Paul Miller got sick, and doctors took his hands and feet to save his life. He and his wife drew on their faith to overcome. But could they recapture something lost?

Paul Miller raises his arm to God as he and his wife Shelly are greeted by the members of Stillmeadow Church of the Nazarene on April 21. Miller was struck with a bacterial infection in February that was so severe, he nearly died. Doctors had to amputate his hands and feet to keep him alive, and ever since, he and Shelly have been adjusting to a new life. (Jason Plotkin - Daily Record/Sunday News)

Shelly Miller stood watch at her husband Paul Miller's side as he lay dying in a Lehigh County hospital bed.

Days earlier, in the early morning of Feb. 4, Shelly insisted Paul go to the emergency room in York.

She knew Paul didn't feel well, but she didn't know how sick he was until doctors put him on a ventilator and in an induced coma, and gave him a 5 percent chance of survival.

Now, doctors were saying they needed to amputate Paul's limbs. The invading illness had cut off their oxygen supply, killing the tissue.

Doctors had to take his hands and feet to stop the illness from spreading.

Shelly was afraid Paul was going to die.

Even if he lived, Shelly didn't think she would ever hold his hand again.

• • •

VIDEO: Meet Paul and Shelly Miller, and hear them describe how Paul responded when he learned his hands and feet were lost, and what it meant to him to appear before his church community "alive and well." As Paul says, "This is a feel-good story, my friend." Watch the documentary by Jason Plotkin below, or click here.

The sadness of watching the illness take life as she knew it -- Paul's hugs and hand-holding -- still brings tears to her eyes.

• • •

She was in shock, and afraid.

It seemed as if one minute they were driving to the hospital, and the next, Paul was being put on a ventilator and into a medically-induced coma.

Shelly was asked to sign paperwork, consenting to Paul's care. She didn't know what to do. They were partners; they made decisions together.

On Feb. 7, three days after Paul walked into the emergency room, he was transferred from York Hospital to the burn unit at Lehigh Valley Hospital, because his tissue was dying as though he had been badly burned.

Shelly told the doctors to do whatever was necessary to save Paul. When they said no patient as sick as Paul had lived through the illness, Shelly offered her plan.

"We're just going to pray for a miracle," she said.

She did, and she recruited thousands of others to do the same.

Shelly reached out to their church, Stillmeadow Church of the Nazarene in Manchester Township, and used Facebook to spread her prayer requests.

At first, people said prayers to save Paul's hands and feet.

Even before Paul got to Lehigh Valley Hospital, the doctors told Shelly he would likely lose his hands and feet, which, they had explained, were dead before he got to the emergency room that first night.

Six days after Paul was transferred to Lehigh Valley Hospital, doctors amputated his hands. Two days after that, they took his feet.

"The hands were the hardest," Shelly said, tears welling in her eyes. "You think of all the things you'll never do."

They loved to hold hands, she said. She knew that Paul would be devastated if he woke from the coma and saw himself.

Now she prayed, and asked others to pray, that God would prepare Paul. They prayed that Paul would accept what happened, that he would find strength to adapt.

When the doctors praised Shelly's strength and courage -- she was by his side nearly every day -- she told them they were mistaken.

"I know where my strength comes from," Shelly told them. "It comes from the Lord. Because if it was my strength, I would be in a corner sucking my thumb."

Shelly's faith strengthened her resilience.

The question was how well Paul would manage when he awoke to a new life.

"I don't want to be negative, but this is flippin hard," Paul said, sweat glistening on his brow.

He was sprawled on a short staircase at a WellSpan rehabilitation center, trying to go up the stairs in a therapy exercise.

New, foreign feet were attached to his legs below his knees, where he was still swollen and sore from the amputations.

Paul, when he woke from the coma weeks before, learned what had happened to him. He didn't despair. His attitude was an answer to Shelly's prayers.

He was transferred from Lehigh Valley Hospital to York Hospital, where he started physical and occupational therapy.

This day, unable to feel the floor with his plastic feet, Paul grew tired.

He sat a minute to take a breath. But his mind kept racing, determined to find a way up the stairs.

He pulled himself up, and with help from hospital staff, he made his way up the short staircase and rang the bell at the top.

Victory, for now.

"He's bound and determined he's going to sleep in his own bed," Shelly said. Paul needed to make it up the steps in therapy in order to make it up the steps to the second floor at home, where his bedroom was waiting.

Paul would be leaving the hospital on April 16, just a few days away.

At home, they would have to fare without nurses' help.

Paul's legs, still healing at the amputation sites, were sore.

And he still had no hands.

• • •

On a May morning inside the South George Street office of Abilities Prosthetics & Orthotics, Paul Miller waited in the lobby.

In the weeks since leaving the hospital, his feet, once foreign, became more a part of him.

Now, eager to get going, he tapped his toes.

He was being fitted for hands.

He hoped they would bring him freedom, and give Shelly more freedom, too. Paul could see his own progress, but he still leaned on Shelly for everything.

She drove him everywhere. Her hands bathed him, dressed him and fed him.

"I tell her I feel like a drill sergeant," he said.

And she has to live with the memory of what happened.

"She was there in the dark days," Paul said.

He asked her to share with him, but she couldn't. She tried not to remember. The grief was too much.

Paul's new hands meant moving forward for both of them.

They were excited for the next step in healing.

But they were unsure how much of his old life Paul would get back.

• • •

Perched in his electric scooter, a metal hook where his right hand once was, Paul zoomed around the gravel lot at his trucking company.

It was a hot August day, and he had two drivers to train. They were learning to drive flatbeds, which could give them a better paycheck.

Paul Miller uses his wheelchair to make his way around the property of his trucking business in North Codorus Township in August. Part of the reason Miller wanted a specialized prosthetic hand was to help him return to work. (Jason Plotkin - Daily Record/Sunday News)

Paul rocked his weight forward in his chair, shifting the momentum to stand up on his prosthetic legs. He wanted to be able to see them as they secured the tarp.

"In theory, I should not be helping these guys," Paul said. They needed to learn to do it on their own, like they would have to do it when they were on the road.

Although he walked the two men through securing an imaginary load by memory, Paul wasn't able to get back to driving himself yet.

He was becoming accustomed to his new hands. Crude as they were, they worked for things like holding a pen or a fork, and pecking the keys on a computer keyboard.

Paul was hopeful that he would be able to get back to driving in time, another step toward a normal life.

In two days, he was heading back to Ability Prosthetics & Orthotics to try out his new myoelectric hand.

He had been fitted for the hand, and the electric impulses in his arm had been tested to make sure he could use his remaining nerves to control the hand.

He wasn't sure of all the ways the new hand would fit into his life, but he knew he wanted to give Shelly a gift she'd been waiting for.

• • •

Laughter filled the waiting room of Ability Orthotics & Prosthetics.

Paul joked with friends who gathered for the big day.

Paul Miller, right, jokes with Rachel Wagner, a rehabilitation counselor with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, as the duo sit in the lobby at Ability Prosthestics & Orthotics in August. Wagner helped Miller get help from the state to afford a myoelectric hand -- advanced technology that can cost up to $250,000. (Jason Plotkin - Daily Record/Sunday News)

The computer components were visible through its translucent plastic covering. The wrist, able to rotate. The fingers, each knuckle joint accounted for.

The myoelectric hand has 24 grip patterns to choose from, Wooden explained to Paul and Shelly. It comes with an iPod touch, which has an app that communicates with the hand. The app is loaded with grip patterns, selected by clicking the icon on the iPod screen.

Paul would control the movement using flexion and extension of his muscles. Those muscles and nerves, which used to communicate with his wrist to allow for movement, would now send messages to Paul's new hand.

Wooden helped Paul fit the cuff of the myoelectric arm onto his right arm. Once it was in place, Wooden slid her finger over the iPod's shiny screen.

Paul watched in amazement as his new fingers closed.

"We have movement," Shelly said, smiling.

Six months, one week and nine days before, Shelly had watched her husband, comatose, fighting to live. When his limbs were amputated, she didn't think she would ever hold his hand again.

Wooden handed her the iPod. Shelly looked at the icons on the screen.

Pick one, Wooden said.

Someone joked that maybe Shelly wanted to find a grip that could hold a vacuum, so she could put Paul to work cleaning the house when they got home.

"I'm trying to find one where he can hold my hand," Shelly said.

The room grew quiet.

Shelly found the right icon.

She put her finger to the screen.

Paul's fingers moved, opening his palm, and Shelly slipped her hand into his.

"It took a while," Paul said, tears filling his eyes, too. "But this is great."

For the first time in more than six months, Paul Miller holds the hand of his wife Shelly by using his myoelectric prosthesis at Ability Prosthestics and Orthotics in August. In February, doctors had amputated Paul's hands and feet to stave off a severe bacterial infection, and Shelly mourned the loss of normal things like holding hands with her husband. (Jason Plotkin - Daily Record/Sunday News)

• • •

Read on to learn more about Paul Miller, his illness and his prosthetic hands and feet.

It could have been prevented

Paul Miller doesn't often look back.

Dwelling on the past doesn't help.

But if there's one thing he regrets, it's not knowing a vaccine existed that could have prevented the illness that took his hands and feet.

Paul had his spleen removed in 1978, after a bad vehicle crash. Without a spleen, he was susceptible to infection. When he became ill with streptococcus pneumoniae in February, the illness nearly killed him.

Paul learned after he awoke from a coma, his hands and feet amputated, that a vaccine exists to help protect against severe infections caused by streptococcus pneumoniae. It's a pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine, according to the National Institutes of Health, and people can ask their doctor about it.

Now, Paul is determined to tell others about the vaccine.

"Get the flippin' shot," he said, "Because it will save your life."

• • •

Gratitude and acceptance

"With what happened to me and how I should have died, and the 5 percent survival rate, it makes me happy just to be here every day," Paul Miller said on a crisp September afternoon.

But some days, he is filled with frustration, and he has moments of anger and sadness. Often those moments come when he thinks about how the illness changed the future he wanted to give to his wife.

"I told (Shelly) the other day, this is not what I had planned," Paul said. "Yeah, I can be selfish and say for me, but it's not what I had planned to give her in our golden years.

"We used to like to hold hands on the beach and in the mountains," Paul said. "That won't ever happen again."

When those thoughts start to consume him, he has to take a step back and focus on the bigger picture.

"It's hard not to be positive, when I can see what God did for me and what the community did for me," Paul said. "It just wouldn't be fair to anybody to be negative."

And in some ways, he said, what happened to him -- the illness and amputations -- has been a gift to others, a lesson in how quickly life can change.

"Their marriage is better, their spouse means more to them than it used to," Paul said. "And their walk with the Lord means more than it used to."

Myoelectric hands, the motorized ones that look more lifelike and allow for more dexterity, firing in reaction to the electric impulses sent by a person's existing limb muscles, cost between $150,000 and $250,000 each.

Paul Miller wanted both technologies to get back as much of his life as possible.

Wooden put him in touch with Rachel L. Wagner, a rehabilitation counselor with the state department of labor and industry's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation.

Wagner said people have to have a vocational need to qualify for help from her office.

"Paul is my first myoelectric hand I've ever done," Wagner said. "It was definitely amazing that we were able to get this approved."

Wagner said her office covered the cost of Paul's right conventional hand and his myoelectric hand.

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